In the past two weeks, I have been working in departments outside of the Youth Services area, and it has given me a new appreciation for all that happens in a public library, as well as how everything works together. On Mondays during the month of February, I spend my mornings in the depths of the library with Tech Services and the catalogers. I met with the head of the department, Lisa, who gave me insight into what goes on behind the scenes. One of the most telling things about the job is that, while I was there, there was nothing to do. The library has had their budget slashed and so there are rarely new acquisitions for her to catalog. We sat talking for three hours about all of the odd jobs that she does in addition to cataloging, such as being the director of a foundation that works with those with special needs. The director of the city library system called while I was there and I got to see how people interact, as though the library is a big family.
In addition to Youth Services and Tech Services, I have had the opportunity to sit in on two Saturday classes in the Virginia Room, the archive of the library. The first Saturday of this month was a class on Finding Elusive Women, and the crowded room was given several pages of helpful tools and a lecture on how best to use databases to find women in history. The class is centered on genealogy, so Wendy Allen, the archivist, used the examples of her own family tree to show how she has traced her lineage back several generations. The second Saturday was a class on how to use the census and its variations to track genealogy. I was not aware of how complex it could be and all of the different subsets that exist. It was interesting to learn and both classes had at least a dozen attendees with their own stories to tell and challenges to share. Sitting in on the classes gave me a new appreciation for the types of services that a library can provide outside of just providing books and internet access.
